Alan G. Brooks - Art and Illustration

 True story this one.  It was 1967 and I had just been to the swimming baths. It was cold and typically English weather.  I was in Silver Street at the Fish and Chip shop. Getting some nosh to stave off the hunger that swimming had brought on. Also - fish and chips are much better after you've had a swim - and it's a bit of a ritual anyway. So, I bump into an old school friend out side the shop. He was a guitar player and getting involved in all of that. Guitars hadn't totally got me yet - but it was all around - and it was 1967 too! I wasn't prepared for the statement that unfolded next. My friend told me that Jimi Hendrix was here last week in this very road, York Rd. a few paces from where we were standing. This place had the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Kinks, Pink Floyd - you name it - all flooding through its doors since 1963. All had played there and the building itself was no bigger than the average pub to squeeze everyone into. Those really were the days appare...

                            So - I'm getting bits and pieces together of Kings Heath so as to make a story about it. It'll be my story and it will all be the absolute truth. I know it will be the absolute truth because I will be making it all up myself! Bottom line is a lot of great things happened in - on - and around Kings Heath. Trouble is I only found out about many of them a little too late, it seems. So, the big one was my being a little too young at the time to appreciate the Ritz Ballroom in York Road. To find out that such a magical place existed and pulled in the likes of the Beatles, The Kinks, Moody Blues, Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd - and more, is staggering. They all played there in the sixties. Just up the road from where I lived and 'grew up.'  So I thought I'd get involved in all of that past and hot rod it all up a bit. Not that a line up of bands  like the above need hot rodding or embellis...

Kings Heath and the Sixties.  Acrylic painting - Alan Brooks - "Sixties part one." - detail - 2010 I grew up in Kings Heath , Birmingham. Down the road from my house was York Road. In York Road was  a place called the Ritz Ballroom . Not long after The Beatles released their record "Please Please Me" in 1963 they were booked and played there. After that, heaven knows what happened, The Rolling Stones , The Kinks , Pink Floyd  Robert Plant and The Moody Blues all played there too! I heard that this piece of musical history burned down in 2013 - and was then demolished in 2015. I wasn't old enough to have seen any of those acts at the venue, but they had a lasting impact on me all the same. Alan G Brooks